somedeafdudefromPNW
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Okay, basic run down:
I have been considering becoming a Teacher of the Deaf ever since junior high when I was 13 or 14. I did not approve of what they did in the mainstream school. Why? It got to do a lot with my childhood. Read below. Skip if you want.
Background:
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Growing up, I was in a mainstream school. My parents encouraged me to associate with people from the Deaf community. I was taught ASL by my grandma's neighbour. The interpreter I had was trained in ASL. The teachers treated me as equal. I didn't learn how to speak until I was 8 and I was taught phonetics during speech therapy. Speech therapy was done in ASL, not SEE or PSE. I learned how to read and write English via ASL.
Just before junior high, or middle school as some of you may call it, my family moved to a city that has strong audist policy at their school, and it still does, and the Deaf community was or is largely segregated from the hearing world; I haven't visited my parents' city in awhile to know how the community is functioning there. No one in the school system knew ASL. They just knew SEE2 and cued speech. I was VERY confused, and when I signed, I was told that my signing was wrong and was corrected to format my sentences in English without the stupid grammar of SEE2. I was also expected to include cued speech. No one took the time to explain what SEE2 and cued speech was for. So in order to pass the classes, I relied heavily on reading since I couldn't really understand the "interpreters," well more like people who can transliterate, at all until I got a real interpreter in my last two years of high school.
Speech therapy was hell for me because we were trained to be like perfectionists. We were expected to say words without any errors. In therapy, we were told to sit still and be like almost... like soldiers? Hard to explain what the therapists expected. So my speech ability backslid under that program, and my mom was very angry about that. My speech was later restored when I went back to being taught phonetics when I got a real interpreter. I was not expected to say words properly, but to be able to make the proper sounds. And boy, there is a lot more phonetics than there are letters in the Latin and Greek alphabets combined.
I owe my success to that interpreter, and my grandmother who taught me how to read. However somewhere along the line, I stopped being "Deaf" and just became "deaf" since I didn't have much contact with the local Deaf community, if that makes any sense.
So I went to University of Alberta with a major in English literature and minor in History. I was planning to combine it with Education from the start. I tried to flaunt my signing skills whenever possible to keep my ASL strong. Then I messed up along the way due to deep depression and ended up in a completely different program which was very different than the direction I was heading without paying attention to what I was doing.
Hint: I ended up in a zoology program.
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I am still very much angry about how I was raised in the education system and would like to change that. I understand the need for strong English skill, but I could had not learned English without ASL. So because of this, I am a strong supporter of BiBi, but is very much against audism or oralism.
And right now, I am seeing all these kids that never got the same foundations as I did, and are being pushed along the school because teachers figured that the government will take care of them and put them on disability or train them to perform less-than-desirable jobs. I know people of my own age that never seen real ASL before; it is still a culture shock to me to learn that there are deaf people out there that only had experience with SEE and or cued speech, which I still don't even understand how the MCE systems work. MCE systems are so backward conceptually, even with my strong English roots.
So, I can speak fine for the most part except I tend to flatten my vowels and I don't have too much emotional acoustics in my voice, so I can come across as monotonous from time to time. Fortunately, I am able to exploit it to deliver dry humor. I also have low vision, which I don't feel it impacts the quality of my life at all, but my vision does have more social stigma than my deafness does for some odd reason. :roll:
Anyway, I am considering going back to school to become a teacher again. What hurdles to overcome and loops am I expected to jump through by the school system, and possibly the government in Canada, if I was to become a Teacher of the Deaf?
Merci beacoup.
I apologise for the extremely long and dull post, but I felt like I needed to explain my motivation for becoming a teacher.
I have been considering becoming a Teacher of the Deaf ever since junior high when I was 13 or 14. I did not approve of what they did in the mainstream school. Why? It got to do a lot with my childhood. Read below. Skip if you want.
Background:
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Growing up, I was in a mainstream school. My parents encouraged me to associate with people from the Deaf community. I was taught ASL by my grandma's neighbour. The interpreter I had was trained in ASL. The teachers treated me as equal. I didn't learn how to speak until I was 8 and I was taught phonetics during speech therapy. Speech therapy was done in ASL, not SEE or PSE. I learned how to read and write English via ASL.
Just before junior high, or middle school as some of you may call it, my family moved to a city that has strong audist policy at their school, and it still does, and the Deaf community was or is largely segregated from the hearing world; I haven't visited my parents' city in awhile to know how the community is functioning there. No one in the school system knew ASL. They just knew SEE2 and cued speech. I was VERY confused, and when I signed, I was told that my signing was wrong and was corrected to format my sentences in English without the stupid grammar of SEE2. I was also expected to include cued speech. No one took the time to explain what SEE2 and cued speech was for. So in order to pass the classes, I relied heavily on reading since I couldn't really understand the "interpreters," well more like people who can transliterate, at all until I got a real interpreter in my last two years of high school.
Speech therapy was hell for me because we were trained to be like perfectionists. We were expected to say words without any errors. In therapy, we were told to sit still and be like almost... like soldiers? Hard to explain what the therapists expected. So my speech ability backslid under that program, and my mom was very angry about that. My speech was later restored when I went back to being taught phonetics when I got a real interpreter. I was not expected to say words properly, but to be able to make the proper sounds. And boy, there is a lot more phonetics than there are letters in the Latin and Greek alphabets combined.
I owe my success to that interpreter, and my grandmother who taught me how to read. However somewhere along the line, I stopped being "Deaf" and just became "deaf" since I didn't have much contact with the local Deaf community, if that makes any sense.
So I went to University of Alberta with a major in English literature and minor in History. I was planning to combine it with Education from the start. I tried to flaunt my signing skills whenever possible to keep my ASL strong. Then I messed up along the way due to deep depression and ended up in a completely different program which was very different than the direction I was heading without paying attention to what I was doing.
Hint: I ended up in a zoology program. -----------------------------------------------------------------------
I am still very much angry about how I was raised in the education system and would like to change that. I understand the need for strong English skill, but I could had not learned English without ASL. So because of this, I am a strong supporter of BiBi, but is very much against audism or oralism.
And right now, I am seeing all these kids that never got the same foundations as I did, and are being pushed along the school because teachers figured that the government will take care of them and put them on disability or train them to perform less-than-desirable jobs. I know people of my own age that never seen real ASL before; it is still a culture shock to me to learn that there are deaf people out there that only had experience with SEE and or cued speech, which I still don't even understand how the MCE systems work. MCE systems are so backward conceptually, even with my strong English roots.
So, I can speak fine for the most part except I tend to flatten my vowels and I don't have too much emotional acoustics in my voice, so I can come across as monotonous from time to time. Fortunately, I am able to exploit it to deliver dry humor. I also have low vision, which I don't feel it impacts the quality of my life at all, but my vision does have more social stigma than my deafness does for some odd reason. :roll:
Anyway, I am considering going back to school to become a teacher again. What hurdles to overcome and loops am I expected to jump through by the school system, and possibly the government in Canada, if I was to become a Teacher of the Deaf?
Merci beacoup.
I apologise for the extremely long and dull post, but I felt like I needed to explain my motivation for becoming a teacher.
I don't really blame them though.
I have heard a lot of good things about the Brown college.